Finances can be complicated. Specifically, finances include managing various financial accounts (e.g., credit card accounts, checking accounts, savings accounts), managing different sources of income, having various financial obligations (e.g., obligations derived from healthcare and repayment of loans), planning for future events, preparing reports (e.g., tax return and other filings), etc. In efforts to simplify finances, users may use a financial application. The financial application organizes and simplifies the financial landscape of an individual or an organization.
On occasion, a user of a financial application requires assistance to use the financial application. For example, the user may require technical assistance regarding how to use the financial application or financial assistance regarding how to classify or input financial data. When a user requires assistance, the user may contact support personnel (e.g., by telephone, email, or chat) and/or may use documents, such as help files and tutorials, generated by the vendor of the financial application or professional tutors of the financial application.
In addition to documents, the user may access a community help forum for the financial application. A community help forum is a virtual location that allows different users to communicate about a topic. Users may review existing postings in the community help forum and transmit new postings containing questions, comments, or answers to the community help forum. Thus, the community help forum provides a communication link between users. Using the community help forum, users may share experiences with the financial application and assist each other.
When postings are displayed in the community help forum, the postings are ranked. An optimal ranking of postings lists postings in order of relevance. Specifically, the optimal ranking of the postings allows users to view the most relevant postings first without having to view postings that are not relevant. Many algorithms exist that provide a heuristic to the optimal ranking. Specifically, each algorithm attempts to achieve the optimal ranking so that users may quickly find the posting that answers the users' questions.